Ideapad U1 Hybrid Tablet Views

General Goods

The Hybrid, due in Q2 with a starting price around a thousand dollars, offers something truly unique: a full-featured Windows notebook with a screen that just happens to pop off and turn into a really powerful tablet. By day, the U1 Hybrid is an 11.6-inch ultraportable notebook with a Core 2 Duo ULV CPU, 1366/×768 screen, Windows 7 Home Premium, and a hard drive or SSD. By night, its removable screen turns into an 11-inch tablet with a gorgeous custom Linux OS (more on that later).

In our hands-on time with a pre-production U1 Hybrid, we first took note of the comfortable, rubberized deck, the silver trim around the edges, and high-tech red translucent lid. We didno’t get to do any serious typing on the keyboard, but it looked like a typical IdeaPad keyboard, nothing particularly new or extraordinary. We wish Lenovo would use the same island-style, highly tactile keyboard it now has on the ThinkPad Edge, ThinkPad X100E, and Skylight smartbook, but this is a minor quibble.

One of the most impressive things about the U1 Hybrid is its ability to share information about the user session on the tablet with the base. Right now that means that, if you are surfing the Web on the tablet and then reattach it to the base, Windows will open a browser with the same Web page or pages (in the case of multiple tabs) you had open in Skylight OS. In Windows there is also a share program that makes it easy for users to copy media from the notebook base to the tablet.

Lenovo plans to launch the IdeaPad U1 in China in March or April, with the United States to follow, but while China ’s U1 will only get Android 2.2, therec’s hope for Honeycomb stateside. Product Specialist Matthew Kohat said the IdeaPad U1 is e“likelyr” to use the tablet-friendly version of Googleo’s OS in the United States. At the very least, he said, Lenovo will wait until Honeycomb launches before bringing over the hybrid.